02/13/2003
HOUSTON –The woman who ran down her philandering husband with a Mercedes-Benz after catching him at a hotel with his mistress was convicted of murder Thursday by a jury that rejected her claim she was aiming for his lover's car.
Clara Harris stood stoically as the verdict was read, her lawyer's arms around her. The 45-year-old dentist faces up to life in prison when she is sentenced, though the punishment could be reduced if jurors decide she acted with "sudden passion."
Jurors, two of whom cried when state District Judge Carol Davies read the verdict, deliberated about eight hours over two days.
Court was to reconvene later Thursday morning for the sentencing phase.
In closing arguments, defense attorney George Parnham took jurors through the mind of the Houston-area dentist who killed her orthodontist husband by driving over him after she caught him with another woman.
"In one week, she spiraled down from a life of dignity and self-respect to the knowledge that her neighbors and everyone else knows her husband was being unfaithful," Mr. Parnham said. "Didn't she react like any woman would act?"
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Harris County prosecutor Mia Magness, however, urged jurors not to let sympathy color their verdict.
"David Harris was a jerk. You understand the pain it caused the defendant. The solution was to get a divorce," she told the nine-woman, three-man jury. "She could do what every woman in this county does: take him to the cleaners, make him wish he was dead. She ran over him again and again and again. It's time for you to call her what she is, and that is a murderer."
It has been a trial of titillating revelations, including David Harris' torrid affair with his receptionist, Gail Thompson-Bridges. At one point, according to notes Dr. Harris kept, David Harris, 44, compared his wife with his lover, prompting Dr. Harris to start a weight-loss program, plan liposuction surgery and breast enhancement, and have sex up to three times a night in the week leading up to his death.
Among the character witnesses for Dr. Harris were her husband's parents, who recalled her as a sweet and loving wife and mother.
In closing arguments, Mr. Parnham said Ms. Thompson-Bridges caused discord in what he called a "marriage made in heaven."
He said that it was an accident when Dr. Harris, with her stepdaughter in the car, ran over her husband. David Harris had just left a Houston hotel with his lover.
"You saw Clara Harris on the stand," he said. "You saw Clara Harris during the course of this trial. Do you think those are rehearsed tears? ... Do you believe if for one moment if Clara Harris intended to kill David Harris, she would have had his daughter in the car?"
But pain isn't sufficient reason to kill someone, Ms. Magness said in her summation.
"There is a level of desperation there that I know touches you, and you feel sorry for her because of it," she told jurors. "You cannot excuse what she did intentionally and knowingly because she was hurt."
After deliberating six hours, jurors passed a note to state District Judge Carol Davies requesting testimony read back to them to resolve whether Dr. Harris said she told police she wanted to "hurt him" or "separate them" with her car.
The jury returned to the courtroom and heard testimony read back from the transcript in which Dr. Harris said that "I wanted to separate him from her" but that she only wanted "to hurt him emotionally," not physically.
Judge Davies sequestered the jurors for the night when they failed to reach a verdict.
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